Why I sucked when talking about Dave Winer

Earlier this year I flamed Dave Winer about Facebook. The gist of the post was that Dave was complaining about Facebook lock-in and rather than disagreeing with Dave on the issue I flamed Dave. It was a stupid thing to do and the kind of thing that contributes to the muck and the sludge that has become common in blogging. Of course I got some Techmeme flow out of it, making the issue bigger than it should have been. If Dave had attacked me personally, it would be different. I’m willing to stand up for myself and call someone out when needed. But Dave didn’t criticize me (he doesn’t even know me well enough)- he criticized Facebook and in looking back, he was right and I was wrong. The contact data on Facebook is locked into that platform and not usable, even through the APIs.

When I was thinking about what kind of blog I want to have in 2008, that episode stood out as the type of thing I want to avoid going forward. So I extend an apology to Dave and make a commitment to avoid this kind of bullshit in 2008.

Fatblogging is dead. Long live fatblogging.

While the fatblogging concept seemed to work well for a number of folks in 2007, fatblogging did not work for me. More to the point, my attempt at weight loss and accountability via blogging took a turn for the worst in July when I “went off the grid”, stopped blogging about my weight, diet and exercise and started back to my old ways. I’m sad to report that nearly 10 months after I started my experiment, I’m back to my original weight plus or minus five pounds. I’m very disappointed, but the 4-5 months of progress that I made last year encouraged me enough to know that I can change my health if I focus on it. I did lose weight without the use of a fad diet or signficant food restrictions which was an accomplishment.

While my experiment failed, the goal to get healthy lives on. I’m going to take another run at this starting on January 1st and try to make this the year that I turn my health around after being significantly overweight for about 10 out of the last 12 years. Wish me luck as I start again. I won’t be “fatblogging” but I will try to post progress and may even document my results via Flickr.

Goodbye Daily Grind

After many years and over 1300 posts, Mike Gunderloy’s Daily Grind is coming to an end. His final post will be tomorrow. Mike has moved out of the world of Microsoft/.NET oriented development and into other technologies. He decided that Microsoft-related work was no longer for him and took 2007 to transition from Microsoft-related work. I wish him well as he makes the final step of his transition.

I’ve worked with Mike before and have nothing but praise for him- he’s a great guy in an industry filled with people that are all talk and little action. He has produced more in a few years than many people will produce in their entire careers. I’ll be sure to continue to follow him at A Fresh Cup. I also hope that Microsoft can win Mike back someday as a supporter and enthusiast. Best of luck Mike.

Watches are jewelry, mobile phones are for information

Gizmodo offers a question of the day- Do you use your watch or your mobile phone to tell time? My answer is that I use my mobile phone. While I do wear a watch nearly every day (I wear an Oris), it is more like a piece of jewelry than it is a practical time piece. I use my cellphone for telling time, checking e-mail, getting weather and traffic updates and getting the latest news. To me, once you have used a mobile phone as a primary device for sending and receiving information there is no substitute. Not even the trusty old wrist watch.

The RIAA is still a nuisance

I’m a user of a paid subscription service for music (the Zune Marketplace), but when Napster was still new I tried P2P filesharing to sample new music. I still bought CD’s over the years and continue to buy a few from time to time even today. There is something that is still satisfying about having the media for albums you really like. Over the last three years or so, I thought that the whole filesharing phenomenon was largely over with the exception of campus networks, which battle the issue at the network layer typically. Stories of the record companies suing individuals haven’t really crossed my radar in a while. From my vantage point I thought that DRM was largely on the ropes (at least for music), the record companies were opening up their business models and filesharing was rapidly dissipating. Boy, was I naive.

Today’s Washington Post has an article on recent judgements against end users sharing files. One of the examples cited in the article involves a $220K judgement against a user sharing 24 (that’s right, twenty four!) songs. This represents damages of over $9000 per song. TechCrunch also has an article about a recent case in which the RIAA argues that it is illegal to rip your own legally purchased CDs to your personall computer. This posture represents an extremely aggressive position by the record companies; some might even say desperate. Yet one thing is clear- the RIAA doesn’t intend to go down without a fight. Despite the new world of YouTube and MySpace for publishing content and gaining notoriety, the old record industry (that adds so little value) intends on sticking around- and sticking it to users- for quite a while.